Why John McCain is Lying: Fact and Narrative in the Presidential Race

This week NPR reported that many major news organizations have independently looked into Sarah Palin’s “bridge to nowhere” story and found it wanting. She was for it before she was against it and never said, “Thanks, but no thanks” to the money. In fact, she has a record of acquiring earmarks for her town and state. Remarkably, however, she continues to repeat the bridge story to crowds of voters, who reward her efforts with rapturous cheers. Apparently the truth is irrelevant. The McCain campaign has even made so bold as to mischaracterize findings of FactCheck, which is both a complement to and a dig at this nonpartisan site that thinks facts matter. The Washington Post also covered untruth’s growing currency in a piece called “As Campaign Heats Up, Untruths Can Become Facts Before They’re Undone.” In it they covered this and other instances of truth-stretching, and they even caught the Obama campaign out on a couple examples, though nothing so bold as the McCain campaign offers. (I can hear the McCain campaign laughing now: “Wimps! Who cares if ‘The View’ notices? Facts are for sissies and elitists.”)

Apparently narratives are more important than facts. Or rather, the truths in narratives matter more than the actual facts in them. This kind of thing is normal enough for fiction and poetry, but it is strange to see in a political campaign, a realm that I once thought had to adhere at least somewhat to fact and the rules of good non-fiction. But apparently a new ethos is in place in the McCain campaign. It is the one Bertolt Brecht advocated in “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties” (Pariser Tageblatt, Dec. 12, 1934, in: Brecht, Galileo, trans. Eric Bentley, Grove Press, 133-50). Brecht used the term “truth” loosely. For him it was about the supposed correctness of the communist vision of the world. It was a “weapon” to be used against capitalism, which he believed was the same whether in a fascist state or a liberal democracy. There were huge objective differences between these two systems, but that did not matter to Brecht. For him “truth” lay in the content of his preferred ideology, and it was his job to propagate these ideas. “The truth must be spoken with a view to the results it will produce in the sphere of action.” What he did not want were “no results, or the wrong ones” (137). “Cunning is necessary to spread the truth” (149).

Brecht’s truth was not about facts, and neither is John McCain’s. A good friend of mine who supports McCain expressed a related thought in a comment on another post, where I wrote that I was “less interested in tracking the horse race and more interested in the truth” (#12) “Come on and let’s be honest,” he wrote. “The supposed ‘TRUTH’ about Governor Palin is not going to change your vote one iota” (#13). Or as someone else pointed out to me, people crave narratives, not facts (hat tip). Facts by themselves have little meaning. Historians like me have to give meaning to the facts we find. But we keep that meaning rooted in reality, as I also did in a detailed piece on Palin. The McCain campaign has felt no such compunction, since it is striving to create a new semantic reality instead of using words to describe one that actually exists.

Psychologist and neuroscientist Drew Westen recognizes the importance of narrative in his observations about the challenge Palin presents to Obama: “Whether her performance tonight [in her ABC interview] maintains or diminishes her ticket’s standing in the polls will depend entirely on whether the Obama campaign decides to tell a story about her, rather than challenging isolated statements, and relate it to the last 8 years.” Obama and Biden have been telling a coherent story, but apparently the “more of the same” mantra is not compelling enough. The new story needs to flesh out the problems with McCain himself, as well as those with his choice of running mate. Obama took a step in this direction with his new internet ad, “The McCain Gamble,” whose title highlights the gap between McCain’s rhetoric and his record. The ad suggests which way the game is tilted.